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REQUIEM FOR ORPHEUS
Beyond the cemetery at the end of runway two-seven a boy is smashing a piano. He takes pains. The heaviest piece of masonry he can lift hangs above his head. From the barbed-wire bramble of strings, the unstructured chord spurts out over scattered clapboard and concrete, splashes the underbelly of a stratoliner, and drenches the gravediggers in their four-square hole. This, only the boy can hear. He learned once of a contest in which two men armed with sledgehammers raced to pass each a concert grand through a toilet seat. Then there was the man who, taking a longer time over it, ground down the ivory and ebony and iron and passed the whole thing through his own linked orifices. This boy is only beginning. After the ground-planning of agriculture and the outcropping of cities, the pianoforte was surely the masterwork of reason—beauty at one's fingertips, pure energy transferred through the linkage of levers. Bungalows have burst through the sound barrier. Their bits move at random through the dreams and bowels of schoolboys. In every smashed piano, a home.
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